University of Minnesota - Twin Cities

Yugoslav Metropolis

Palas Theater program cover from the late 1920s

My book, Yugoslav Metropolis: Popular Culture, Urban Life, and the Making of a European Capital between the Two Wars, is under contract with the University of Pittsburgh Press and will appear in the Pitt Series in Russian and East European Studies and the Culture, Politics, and the Built Environment Series.

Cover of Radio Belgrade’s companion magazine from the early 1930s

Yugoslav Metropolis is a socio-cultural history of entertainment in Belgrade during the 1920s and 1930s. It argues that foreign popular culture played a central role in the formation of European middle class society in the capital city of unified Yugoslavia. In the decades following the Great War, the state’s middle class leaders grappled to define the parameters of national culture but, at the same time, consumed a palate of the arts and entertainment from beyond Yugoslavia’s borders. They interpreted popular culture like film, jazz, and cabaret as a symbol of European metropolitan modernity and accommodated it as component of bourgeois refinement. Middle class urbanites promoted foreign entertainment in Belgrade with financial investment, loose municipal regulation, and an urban redesign project that segregated a leisure district in the city center. This, however, marginalized Yugoslav performers, lower class establishments, and everyday patrons from urban life. It also undermined the state’s pledge of economic protectionism and showed that middle class interests took precedence over national concerns. Yugoslav Metropolis suggests that the Europeanization of Belgrade’s bourgeois society came at a cost to working class culture and the Yugoslav entertainment industry.